The projects below serve as a starting point for new developers that would like to work on BRL-CAD. The ideas range from very simple to crazy hard with intense math. Each idea links to a page with more details.

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If you want to work on open source '''computer-aided design (CAD), geometry, or graphics''', you've come to the right place!

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Remember that these are just initial ideas. You must expand on these topics with more detail. You're encouraged to scale the scope up, down, or completely change the goals to fit your experience level. A higher or lower difficulty does not affect your chances of acceptance. There are also several [http://brlcad.org/~sean/ideas.html other areas] of development that are of high-interest in addition to those below.

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We'd love to have you work on projects that make our software better. The project possibilities range from very simple to crazy hard with intense math and everything in between. ''Each project idea links to a page with more details.''

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'''Unless there are no qualified applicants, we will be slotting at least one student in each of the three main categories below: High Visibility, STEP Conversion, and Infrastructure.'''

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There are also many [http://brlcad.org/~sean/ideas.html other project ideas] that would be interesting to us. Suggest your own. Don't be shy if you have [[Mailing_Lists|questions]]!

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Remember that these are just initial ideas. You must expand with [[Summer_of_Code/Application_Guidelines|considerably more detail]]. You're encouraged to scale the scope up, down, or completely change the goals to fit your experience level and interest. Proposing a hard project does not improve your chances of getting selected.

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'''Unless there are simply no qualified applicants, we will be selecting at least one student in each of the main categories below: High Visibility, STEPcode, OpenSCAD, and LibreCAD.'''

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Revision as of 14:55, 13 February 2014

If you want to work on open source computer-aided design (CAD), geometry, or graphics, you've come to the right place!

We'd love to have you work on projects that make our software better. The project possibilities range from very simple to crazy hard with intense math and everything in between. Each project idea links to a page with more details.

Remember that these are just initial ideas. You must expand with considerably more detail. You're encouraged to scale the scope up, down, or completely change the goals to fit your experience level and interest. Proposing a hard project does not improve your chances of getting selected.

Unless there are simply no qualified applicants, we will be selecting at least one student in each of the main categories below: High Visibility, STEPcode, OpenSCAD, and LibreCAD.

BRL-CAD Priorities

Be sure to follow our checklist for guidance getting started with your proposal submission if you have not done so already.

Project Categories

High Visibility

BRL-CAD as a project has a number of development areas that represent our "primary" efforts - functionality we are implementing that is fundamentally required to in turn implement a broad range of new features. We will be allocating at least two students to a high visibility project proposal.

NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines) 3D Geometry

BRL-CAD has recently implemented raytracing support for NURBS-based boundary representation geometry. It's one of our priority focus areas with high impact and high visibility. They are also pretty hard so be careful to have sufficient familiarity and lots of milestones.

Idea

Languages

Difficulty

Contacts

NURBS Intersections: Evaluate the intersection of two NURBS surfaces. You'll get a 3D curve or a point, line segment, or even a plane depending how the surfaces overlap.

BRL-CAD has more than a million lines of code so we have to continually refactor and clean up code for maintainability. Cruft happens. These projects help reduce the complexity and make things better. They're not very hard at all, but exceedingly valuable to our project vitality.

Idea

Languages

Difficulty

Contacts

MGED to Archer Command Migration: Our next-generation editor (Archer) needs to have the same (700+) commands that are in MGED. Help make our next CAD interface awesome.

As part of our new GUI development efforts, a lot of code had to be moved out of application space into a library. That library is our geometry editing library, LIBGED. A lot of time, attention, and emphasis is going on there to make sure that all of our core functionality is reusable by applications. More than 100k lines of code have already moved, but there's still a lot more work needed.

Idea

Languages

Difficulty

Contacts

Add exec option to search: Our LIBGED library provides a search command very similar to the UNIX find command for scanning through geometry. Implement the -exec option.

STEP Conversion

We are an invested heavily in the ISO 10303 STEP standard for geometry import and export. Collaborating with the STEPcode community, we will be allocating one or more slots to a qualified capable student to specifically work on a STEP project.

Idea

Languages

Impact

Difficulty

Contacts

STEP Coverage Test: Write a program that links against STEPcode and generates a STEP output instantiating every entity for a given schema. Goal is a comprehensive program and data file for testing STEP import/export.

STEP Viewer: STEP is a common CAD file format supported by just about every major CAD system. Given we have an importer and an interface for displaying geometry, a stand-alone STEP file viewer has some great potential.

Infrastructure

Although we have areas of primary focus, there are many other projects that would be very beneficial to BRL-CAD. We will be allocating at least one slot to a qualified and detailed infrastructure proposal from a capable student.

Web Development

We have high expectations for web development projects because the developer often does not stick around after development is over. We're not interested in web code, we're interested in people. If you're willing to work on your project long after GSoC is over (i.e., joining the project) and are willing to make a long-term commitment to BRL-CAD, then we absolutely welcome your web development project idea.

Idea

Languages

Impact

Difficulty

Contacts

Synchronize Wiki with Docbook: We use Docbook for most of our user documentation but find editing a wiki page much easier to use. Set up a system so the two are always in sync.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

The primary environment in which users interact with BRL-CAD geometry is the MGED geometry editor. The "next generation" interface for MGED, dubbed Archer, has been under development for some time but there is a lot of functionality that still needs to be migrated and new features needed by MGED, Archer, or both.

Geometry Conversion

STEP is an absurdly complicated format, but we're one of the first open source projects to implement a working importer. IGES is a much older standard, but more time-tested too. Both have a variety of potential high-priority projects associated with the.

Idea

Languages

Impact

Difficulty

Contacts

STEP importer improvements: We have an importer, but it's preliminary. Add support for importing hierarchy information, polygonal geometry, and implicit geometry.

Geometry Processing

As part of our new GUI development efforts, a lot of code had to be moved out of application space into a library. That library is our geometry editing library, LIBGED. A lot of time, attention, and emphasis is going on there to make sure that all of our core functionality is reusable by applications. More than 100k lines of code have already moved, but there's still a lot more work needed.

Idea

Languages

Impact

Difficulty

Contacts

GED Transactions: Migrating functionality from our MGED geometry editor into our LIBGED library provided excellent code reuse, but now we need transactions so that actions can be undone.

Rendering & Analysis

Raytracing is at the heart of all that is BRL-CAD. The 'rt' application was the world's first distributed parallel ray tracer, implemented in early 80's, and it's backed by our powerful LIBRT library. We're the best as full path shotlines (shooting all the way through geometry, not just first hit) and can handle crazy big geometry very efficiently, very fast. It's how we perform geometric analysis, generate images, perform simulations, and more.

Idea

Languages

Impact

Difficulty

Contacts

Shader Enhancements: We have a functioning custom shader system in BRL-CAD, but there are now folks that specialize and there's lot of room for improvements.

Scientific

BRL-CAD has been used to visualize Hubble up in orbit (before it was launched), simulate light transport (multispectral analyses), model Earth's interior layers (education), and much more but there are lots of coding projects that would really help make BRL-CAD more useful for general science a work.

Idea

Languages

Impact

Difficulty

Contacts

Astronomical units: We already go "big", but accurately modeling at a galactic scale redefines that notion...

Networking

BRL-CAD includes a variety of tools that utilize networking. Our LIBPKG networking library predates pervasive TCP/IP availability and is time-tested. As BRL-CAD becomes more of an operation-oriented modular infrastructure, improvements to our networking underpinnings become necessary.

<AN IDEA OF YOUR OWN>

Do you have an idea of your own? Let us know and maybe we'll like it too. We're very open to new ideas, areas of academic research, industry applications, and any other ways that may help get you hooked on BRL-CAD development. Just remember that BRL-CAD is a solid modeling CAD suite so keep that in mind when scoping your project.

Requirements:

Passion for the task being suggested

Buy-in from one of the existing developers

Mentors

BRL-CAD operates under group mentorship. That means you can contact anyone, not just the person assigned to you, for assistance. The mailing list and IRC channel are the preferred communication methods.

"There is no conclusion, except the obvious: nothing is so simple. The
beautiful is not always the popular, the popular is not always the
trivial, the trivial not always the unimportant, and the unimportant can
be sometimes beautiful." - Alain Fournier

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